Astronomer denies improper use of web data

Jose-Luis Ortiz of the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada told New Scientist that it was “perfectly legitimate” because he found the logs on a publicly available website via a Google search. But Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer whose logs Ortiz uncovered, claims that accessing the information was at least “unethical” and may, if Ortiz misused the data, have crossed the line into scientific fraud.

The incident highlights two emerging controversies in astronomy. One is a clash between astronomers who report new objects immediately and those who wait until they have studied the objects thoroughly. A second is the acceptability of trawling websites used for communications and record-keeping to learn what other scientists are doing.

The dispute between Ortiz and Brown centres on an object now designated 2003 EL61. It is one of the largest solar system bodies known beyond Neptune and made headlines when Ortiz announced the discovery on 28 July 2005. That report stunned Brown, who had been watching the object for months and planned to describe it in September 2005 at the Division of Planetary Science conference in Cambridge, UK.

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Outside access

Brown quickly e-mailed congratulations to Ortiz, and told the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that he had also been tracking the object. Shortly afterwards, the MPC’s Brian Marsden told Brown that telescope logs including his observations were publicly available on the internet.

That unnerved Brown, and on 29 July he hastily called a press conference to claim discovery of an object even bigger than Pluto – now designated 2003 UB313 – which had also been in those observing logs.

Later Brown checked server records and found that the first outside access to the online observing logs had come on 26 July 2005 from the institute where Ortiz works. Two days later, a second computer from the same institute accessed those same web pages. The computers’ internet addresses matched those used by Ortiz and his student Pablo Santos-Sands to e-mail reports to the MPC.

On August 9, Brown e-mailed Ortiz asking for an explanation and, after receiving no response for several days, filed a complaint with the International Astronomical Union.

“No hacking or spying”

Ortiz now says he found Brown’s observing logs when checking a bright transneptunian object that Santos-Sands showed him on July 25, after finding them in images taken in March 2003. They noticed that Brown’s abstract for the planetary science meeting, posted online a few days before, described a similar object, identified as K40506A, and searched the web for more information.

“A Google search on K40506A leads to a public web page with what appears to be coordinates of many things,” Ortiz wrote to a Yahoo groups mailing list on minor planets. There was “no hacking or spying or anything similar”, Ortiz told New Scientist in an e-mail. He and Santos-Sands also found the object on other images and measured its location before submitting a list of observations to the MPC, which credited them with the discovery on a 28 July email circular.

“We have always acknowledged that Brown’s team had spotted the object in their archives earlier,” Ortiz told New Scientist, but the brief format of the MPC email did not allow that to be mentioned.

Yet Brown is not satisfied, complaining to New Scientist that Ortiz only admitted visiting the observing logs “when he realised that his fingerprints were all over” the website. Brown says Ortiz’s apparent evasiveness leads him to wonder if the Spanish team had actually identified 2003 EL61 before seeing his abstract and telescope log.

Tip of the iceberg

But the incident raises questions that go far beyond a single object. Astronomers report fast-moving or fast-changing objects such as near-Earth asteroids as soon as they spot them because further observations must be made quickly. That is not the case with objects beyond Neptune.

They “go nowhere and do not change over years”, says Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, a colleague of Brown’s. Therefore many astronomers want “to find out more information before announcing them – announcing things in ignorance does everyone a disservice”.

But Ortiz argues that astronomers should report even large, slow-moving transneptunian objects as soon as they confirm the discovery. He told New Scientist “that international scientists working together, collaborating and sharing resources can boost science progress and do the best possible job”.

The incident “is only the tip of the iceberg” in dealing with the accessibility of information on the internet, says the MPC’s Dan Green. No consensus has emerged on proper use of such data and opinions on the Yahoo groups mailing list “seems pretty evenly split”, he notes.